Alphabets and Languages

[Agback]

There are two kinds of scripts. The first is ideograms, where each symbol represents a single concept, and where the symbol does not relate to pronunciation. Examples include Chinese characters, Mayan heiroglyphics, and Arabic numerals.

Actually, Mayan writing is a syllabary (a kind of phonetic writing), not a system of ideograms. It has been deciphered: there was an article about this in the Scientific American about twenty years ago (IIRC).

English uses a version of the Latin alphabet. Roman is a style of type (like italic or uncial).

Cuneiform was a writing system of the ancient Middle East. It is a syllabary with a few ideograms, and is nothing much like Chinese writing.

Hieroglyphs are a kind of Egyptian writing (a mixture of syllabary with a few ideograms). The other kind was Demotic.

Regards,


Agback

 

[Steverooo]

Alphabets?

Actually, "Alphabet" comes from "Alpha, Beta", the first two letters of the Greco-Roman alphabet. I suppose Jewish kids learn the AlephBeth, instead!

The "alphabet" Tolkien used on the dwarven map in The Hobbit was the Futhork (Carolingian runes named for the first several letters; Feogh, Ur, Thorn, Os, Rahdeh (spelling of some of these "letters" probably mangled!)). There is also the "Elder Futhark" (Futhark, not Futhorc).

Naturally, if you want to do the work, Tolkien gives you complete tables of the Dwarven/Elven "alphabets" (if that's the proper term) in the back of volume three... You can translate the maps and title pages in his books, if you want, although (as he mentions) the "scribe" making them hesitates between modern-day writing and that of Gondor, so he uses "dhe" for "the".

Now to REALLY throw you're players off, you can always use the Cherokee sylabary! Maybe Cuneiform or Sanscrit?

 

[CrazyMage]

I use Writing Systems of the World by Akira Nakanishi as a reference when designing props for my games. Tons of examples.

I second this as a great book. Huge variety of scripts sampled for you. Another great one is The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems by Florian Coulmas.

If one wants to talk about writing down sounds/meaning, it's better to speak about "writing systems" than "alphabets" since the latter term is used to refer to a limited set of characters that roughly correspond one for one with a particular sound.

There's some variation, but a syllabary will have a sign for "ta" and a separate one for "te", and another one for "da" and so forth. Katakana/hiragana of Japanese is one example of this, as is Amharic of Ethiopia.

Cuneiform was a writing system of the ancient Middle East. It is a syllabary with a few ideograms, and is nothing much like Chinese writing.

Hieroglyphs are a kind of Egyptian writing (a mixture of syllabary with a few ideograms). The other kind was Demotic.

Hey, don't forget hieratic, Agback

It's a little tricky to describe how cuneiform was used because its use spanned 3000 years and many different languages. When used for Sumerian, there are some conceptual and functional similarities with Chinese (actually, the parallel goes to the next generation--Assyrian and Babylonian used Sumerian signs with Sumerian values but then also gave the same signs new values in their own language, somewhat like Japanese using an old Chinese value or a new Japanese value for various kanji) but cuneiform was even used in Ugarit for writing an alphabetic script. So, very similar outward form, but rather different uses.

 

[CrazyMage]

Omniglot http://www.omniglot.com/index.htm
(links to fonts http://www.omniglot.com/links/fonts.htm esp. helpful)

This is a really great site, and if you are looking for something to add some variety to your game, check out the following examples from this site.

This first group can be done by hand fairly easily.
Ahom
Albanian (Elbasan and Beitha Kukju scripts)
Ancient Berber
Ancient Latin (for variety of scripts)
Batak
Buhid
Burmese
Celtiberian
Coptic
Cree
Cypriot syllabary
Dehong
Devanagari
Futhark (classic runes)
Georgian
Hanuno'o
Hungarian Runes
Karosthi
Lepcha
Lontara
Miao
Ndjuka syllabary
N'ko
Ogham
Old Permic/Abur
Ol Cemet'/Santali
Parthian
Phags-pa
Psalter (Persian variant)
Redjang
Sabaean
Somali
Syloti Nagri
Tagalog
Tai Dam
Tibetan
Tifinagh
Vai syllabary

Higher art talent or using a font
Armenian
Balinese
Bengali
Khmer/Cambodian
Cherokee
Ethiopic
Glagolitic
Gujarati
Kannada
Lao
Malayalam
Manchu
Sinhala
Tai Lue
Tamil
Telugu
Thai

Enjoy!

 

[der_kluge]

Wow, I think I'm more confused now than I was when I started.

So, Mandarin Chinese is a logographic alphabet that uses ideograms?

And Mayan is kind of a combination of ideograms and syllabaries that combine both phonetic sounds and symbols? And Egyptian Hieroglyphs are the same way?

And Japanese is a syllabary language, with symbols that represent sounds?

So, what is Dimetic?

Interesting stuff.

 

[CrazyMage]

Japanese is not a syllabic script; it uses 1,945 standard kanji characters but then mixes is the katakana/hiragana syllabaries to show grammatical endings, spell foreign words, etc. One could write all Japanese in hiragana if one wanted to simplify the reading of the signs. From The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems by Florian Coulmas "As regards the spelling conventions for using kanji and kana in combination, the general principle is that lexical morphemes are written in kanji and grammatical morphemes in hiragana." There are some other nuances that someone who actually knows Japanese or Chinese can explain better.

Japanese has to make some modifications to the Chinese writing system because the two languages work very differently. Always tricky borrowing a writing system from another language.

Again, quoting from the same book: "Maya writing is a logosyllabic system combining logograms and syllable signs in a complex way with a great deal of polyvalence." Polyvalence = written sign has more than one phonetic value.

So, what is Dimetic?

If you mean "demotic" it is a simplified, cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Hieratic is in-between the formal hieroglyphs and demotic.